After its evacuation at the Peace of Paris, in 1763, Sissinghurst Castle became a workhouse, and when it ceased to be used for this purpose gradually fell into ruin and was pulled down. [Illustration: ARTICLES IN WOOD MADE BY THE PRISONERS AT SISSINGHURST CASTLE, 1763 ] CHAPTER X THE PRISONS ASHORE 2. NORMAN CROSS It is just as hard for the visitor to-day to the site of Norman Cross, to realize that here stood, until almost within living memory, a huge war-prison, as it is at Sissinghurst. Whether one approaches it from Peterborough, six miles away, through the semi-rural village of Yaxley, by which name the prison was often called, or by the Great North Road from Stilton—famous for the sale, not the manufacture, of the famous cheese, and for the wreck of one of the stateliest coaching inns of England, the _Bell_—we see but a large, ordinary-looking meadow, dotted with trees, with three or four houses on its borders, and except for its size, which is nearly forty acres, differing in no way from the fields around. An examination of the space, however, under the guidance of Dr. Walker, does reveal remains. We can trace the great ditch which passed round the prison inside the outer wall; some of the twenty-one wells which were sunk still remain, and about thirty feet of the original red brick wall, built in the old ‘English bond’ style, is still above ground. As, with the exceptions presently to be noted, the prisons proper, with the offices pertaining thereto, were built entirely of wood, and were sold and removed when the prison ceased to be, nothing of it remains here, although some of the buildings were re-erected in Peterborough and the neighbouring villages, and may still be seen. The only war-time buildings remaining are the Prison Superintendent’s house, now occupied by Alderman Herbert, and the agent’s house, now belonging to Mr. Franey, both, of course, much altered and beautified, and one which has been variously described to me as the officers’ quarters and the Barrack Master’s residence. In the Musée Historique Militaire at the Invalides, in Paris, there is a most minutely and beautifully executed model of the Norman Cross Prison, the work of one Foulley, who was a prisoner here for five years and three months. Not only are the buildings, wells, palisades, pumps, troughs, and other details represented, but tiny models of prisoners at work and at play are dotted about, and in front of the chief, the eastern gate, a battalion of Militia is drawn up, complete to the smallest particulars of arms and equipment. Not the least interesting relic of the prison days is the prisoners’ burial-ground at the lower end of a field sloping down from the west side of the Great North Road.